OLIVER STONE’S LATEST film, “Snowden,” bills itself as a dramatized version of the life of Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who revealed the global extent of U.S. surveillance capabilities.

Stone’s rendering of Snowden’s life combines facts with Hollywood
invention, covering Snowden being discharged from the military after
an injury in basic training, meeting his girlfriend, and training in the
CIA with fictitious mentors (including Nicolas Cage’s character, most likely a
composite of whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and Bill Binney). Snowden then
goes undercover, only to see an op turn ugly; becomes a contractor for the CIA
and NSA; and finally chooses to leave the intelligence community and disclose
its vast surveillance apparatus, some of which he helped develop.

The movie hits key points in Snowden’s story, including his growing
interest in constitutional law and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,
some of the U.S. surveillance programs he eventually unmasked, and parts of his
furtive meetings in Hong Kong with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras
(co-founders of The Intercept), as well as The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill.

There are doses of artistic license — for example, a Rubik’s Cube hiding
the drive where he stored the documents, and Snowden’s CIA mentor spying on his
girlfriend through her webcam. In hazier focus are the global questions his
revelations raised, including the legal and moral implications of the U.S.
government collecting data on foreigners and Americans with relative impunity,
and the very real stories born of Snowden’s massive disclosures.

So here’s a retrospective of sorts for moviegoers and others interested in
the journalism Edward Snowden made possible through his decision to become a whistleblower:
In all, over 150 articles from 23 news organizations worldwide have
incorporated documents provided by Snowden, and The Intercept and other outlets
continue to mine the archive for stories of social and political significance.

In the hope that Stone’s movie will spark more widespread interest in the
NSA programs Snowden helped bring to light, The Intercept has compiled its
stories based on the archive of documents, which can be explored through the
chart above.

SINCE THE FIRST revelations from Snowden were published in Glenn
Greenwald’s June 6, 2013, Guardian article, “NSA Collecting Phone Records of
Millions of Verizon Customers Daily,” nearly 1,200 documents from Snowden’s
disclosures have been released to the public. These include fragments of the
“black budget,” a secret document presented to Congress by intelligence
agencies, images hacked from drone feeds, and PowerPoint presentations that
painstakingly detail the technology behind the NSA’s surveillance efforts.

The Intercept and other outlets have reported extensively
on some of the major technical programs mentioned during the film — PRISM and
Upstream, both authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act. PRISM vacuums up hundreds of millions of internet
communications every day from the people it “targets,” and those they
communicate with — as well as some irrelevant communications it picks up
“incidentally” because of the way the technology works. It’s unclear how many
of those communications belong to Americans. Upstream gathers communications
while they’re traveling through the cables of the internet — voice, text, and
more. In the movie, Snowden gets a glimpse at these programs while going
undercover for the CIA.

When Snowden shares a map with a few of his colleagues displaying data on
surveillance conducted within different countries, the film is likely nodding
toward a program called Boundless Informant — another one of the first Snowden stories reported
by Greenwald and MacAskill. The NSA denied at the time that it could determine
with absolute certainty “the identity or location” of all the communications it
collected — but the program gave it a general sense of the volume of
information it got from each country, appearing like a sort of heat map.
The U.S. was not, like the movie suggests, the country where the NSA collected
the most information; there were many more intercepts from Iran, at least
during the time period reported on by The Guardian.

The Intercept debuted its Snowden coverage with a February 10, 2014,
article by Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald titled “The NSA’s Secret Role in
the U.S. Assassination Program.” Since then, we have published at least 50
other pieces based on documents from the Snowden archive.

In July 2015, The Intercept delved into one of
the NSA’s central programs, also mentioned in the film, called XKeyscore. The
program runs like a search engine that helps NSA detect, analyze, and extract
information from the massive amounts of communications and online information
it collects every day through various filters. Otherwise, the sheer volume of
information would be overwhelming.

The agency’s use of cellphone and computer hacking for surveillance has
been a recurring theme in The Intercept’s reporting on the Snowden documents.
In May 2015, Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley uncovered the CIA and NSA’s joint
mission to crack the security of popular consumer products, including Apple’s
notoriously secure iPhone. In the movie, Snowden covers his laptop’s webcam,
which he knows the NSA is capable of exploitingthrough a
program called QUANTUM. In reality, the NSA has developed malware implants
potentially capable of infecting millions of targeted computers covertly, and
automated some of the processes involved in the attacks, as Ryan Gallagher and
Glenn Greenwald reported in March
2014.

Many news stories from the Snowden archive involve foreign surveillance and
the NSA’s partnerships with intelligence agencies from other countries, a
subject the Snowden film barely touches — for example, never
mentioning the NSA’s close relationship to the British spy agency
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ); its partnership with countries
like Saudi Arabia; or foreign officials’ lack of understanding about their
own spies’ connections to the NSA. The film’s only nod to foreign intelligence
occurs when Snowden passes off a special microchip to MacAskill, suggesting it
might help him learn more about British spying.

The NSA is obviously more than its technical programs and tools. Stone
conjures up Snowden’s friends and colleagues at the spy agencies, including
T-shirt-wearing hackers, super genius engineers, and domineering bosses. The
Intercept’s Peter Maass has written about the human side of the agency,
including its resident advice columnist, who went by “Zelda”
and answered questions about things like kitchen etiquette and gossip, as well
as acolumnist with
literary ambitions who called himself “the SIGINT Philosopher.”

Ultimately, the movie reflects Stone’s image of the life of an NSA
contract employee. For a real window into the agency, there may be no better
resource than the NSA’s own documents. In May 2016, The Intercept began the
first concerted effort to make large portions of the Snowden archive available
to the public with the release of a set of
SIDtoday newsletters, the internal news organ of the Signals Intelligence
Directorate at the NSA. The batch releases are ongoing and will likely
constitute one of the largest single collections of NSA files.

assange

At midday on Friday 5 February, 2016 Julian Assange, John Jones QC, Melinda Taylor, Jennifer Robinson and Baltasar Garzon will be speaking at a press conference at the Frontline Club on the decision made by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on the Assange case.